Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations

Licensing deals cut by UC Berkeley and Massachusetts’ Broad Institute may be limiting the potentially lie-saving applications of this gene-editing technology, according to assertions made by intellectual property experts in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

Stat:
Exclusive CRISPR Licenses Slow Development Of Therapies, Legal Experts Argue
The exclusive licenses granted to three for-profit companies on key discoveries about the revolutionary genome-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 threaten to “bottleneck” its use “to discover and develop useful human therapeutics,” patent experts argued in a paper published on Thursday. What the exclusive licenses have done “is give an entire industry to … companies that will never be able to fully exploit it,” Jorge Contreras of the University of Utah, a co-author of the paper in Science, said in an interview. “And that may hold back the development of therapies.” (Begley, 2/16)

San Jose Mercury News:
UC-Berkeley CRISPR License Could Hinder Innovation
A smart biotech company could have a great idea for how to use gene editing to develop a new lifesaving therapy — but because of the way licensing deals have been cut by UC-Berkeley and Massachusetts’ Broad Institute, it would never get a chance to try it. That’s the assertion of intellectual property experts in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, who criticize the licensing landscape around the taxpayer-funded and powerful new tool called CRISPR-Cas9, warning it could limit its promise. (Krieger, 2/16)

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